Digitalswitzerland powers biodiversity

The Biodiversity Digital Academy was inaugurated in May 2023 to foster an innovative ecosystem by bridging the gap between well-established partners, industry experts, and selected Swiss startups committed to driving innovative solutions for biodiversity conservation.

An expert jury has identified the ten most promising and leading startups and scaleups to participate in the Academy. By the end of June, each of the participants will be matched with a suitable mentor from the expert panel, consisting of industry representatives from SAP, Samsung, Wipro, Bluerain Partners, Lidl, and the Noah Conference. Over the course of six months between July and December, the participants will benefit from workshops, mentorship programs, networking events, and boot camps designed to create synergies between industry experts and startups that foster digital solutions. The culmination of this journey will be the participation of all startups in the Noah Conference, accompanied by the publication of an open innovation whitepaper featuring their work.

Meet the cohort…

Inverto (Bern) – provides companies sponsoring climate and biodiversity impacts with technology that allows scalable wetland restoration through the automated remote collection of samples. In December 2022, the startup launched pilot project with Delta Blue Carbon (DBC), one of the largest mangrove projects worldwide, for large-scale mangrove restoration using drones. Thanks to the solution, areas of 10,000ha a year can be planted with mangroves.

Open Forest Protocol (OFP) (Lausanne) – is a scalable open platform that allows forest projects of any size to measure, report, and verify (MRV) their forestation data. By managing data on a blockchain, the company ensures that data uploads and data validation results are tamper-proof, immutable, and globally accessible for decades to come.

Nomica (Zug) – is a novel blockchain-based and the first incentive platform and marketplace that connects the value of the world’s ecosystems and social impact projects to the market. Early this year, the company launched the Beta version of its minimal viable product (MVP) and the marketplace.

rrreefs – is dedicated to the preservation of our planet’s coral reef, offering reef regeneration as a service to businesses with ambitious targets for nature. Its prototype is a modular system of 3D-printed rrreef bricks, made with pure clay, which already increases fish biodiversity and coral growth at our pilot site in San Andrés, Colombia.

SimplexDNA (Zurich) – the ETH Zurich spin-off provides next-generation sequencing solutions for environmental monitoring, enabling biodiversity assessments with high accuracy and resolution.

Stream Ocean (Zurich) is building an AI-powered end-to-end solution for real-time marine monitoring in order to understand and assess changes in our oceans. The cpany has so far deployed 14 cameras that deliver live-streaming video and daily data points from the ocean to a client’s desktop.

Xilva (Zurich) creates a global digital marketplace for investing in regenerative forests, bringing transparency, ease and innovation to the deployment of capital. Its proprietary methodology Xilva GRADE ensures that capital providers can invest with confidence.

THE ARK (Zurich) – helps to accelerate your impact with its digital platform and gives investors access to biodiversity and nature conservation investment opportunities. It uses verified data sets to scale conservation efforts and ensures the effectiveness of capital allocation and drives investment decisions.

Non-profit organizations are also joining the academy. These are:
PORINI Solutions (Fribourg) – is a Swiss company building a bridge between innovative technology and conservation, with a special focus on the DLT / blockchain space.

CyberTracker Conservation (South Africa) – is a non-profit Public Benefit Organization that promotes the vision of a worldwide environmental monitoring network.

(RAN)